The Melodramadness of Eugene O'Neill
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.42.2.0194
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Resumo“In the works of O'Neill we can see how desire exceeds spiritual endurance” (4); “everything is forming, little has formed. His works … are like a man laying the foundations for a gorgeous estate, some day to be erected” (6). As its title suggests, Virgil Geddes's 1934 book characteristically portrays O'Neill as a writer whose talents failed to match his ambition. Geddes (1897–1989), a playwright whose 1929 The Earth Between was produced with Bette Davis at the post-O'Neill Provincetown Playhouse, would later became a country postmaster in order to support himself. In the early 1930s he founded the Brookfield Players, who performed in a tobacco barn in Brookfield, Connecticut. One wonders how much of his criticism of O'Neill stemmed from his own frustrated dreams and how much from a possible resentment of O'Neill's commercial and financial success. His ideological austerity may also have been at issue: a member of several Communist groups, Geddes would wind up on HUAC's watch list.Though a mere forty-eight pages, Geddes's book is variously pointed and nuanced. While praising O'Neill for his “passion,” “guts,” and “unrelenting individual fire,” Geddes feels that O'Neill's “individualism is of the tortured, insistent and aggressive kind and he permits his expression to be so peculiarly and exclusively reflective of himself” (6). Moreover, Geddes indicts O'Neill for, in effect, navel-gazing, portraying the playwright as “bent on having his say” and being “a man at war with art” whose plays are “like a confession, an embarrassment of the heart wrung from him against his will” (7). These remarks are strikingly (albeit unwittingly) prescient, looking ahead to the acclaimed late plays, with their highly personal and confessional quality.Early on, Geddes takes umbrage at O'Neill's notoriously copious stage directions and character descriptions. Geddes may have been one of the first, but was certainly not the last, to criticize O'Neill for writing “stage directions which invite antagonism … as though nothing but bad acting was possible” (8). The stage directions are “clumsy explanation … as though acting had nothing to do with his plays” (9). This remark serves as a prelude to Geddes's contention that O'Neill's “writing battles and soars in a terrific attempt to overcome the physical body of drama” (9). O'Neill, in other words, is more a frustrated novelist than a dramatist, an observation more recently explored in Robert M. Dowling's 2014 biography (see Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts [2014], 301–15). While some may agree with Geddes that “grandeur and exaggeration creep into” O'Neill's work, Geddes seems to believe that dramatic characters have a life independent of their author and that O'Neill somehow interferes with his characters' volition (10). For example, Geddes complains that “the author's conscious message gets entangled with the principal character's dialogue,” as though the titular characters would and should be able to say something other than what O'Neill has written for them (10). Geddes looks more favorably upon O'Neill's “minor characters,” which are “gentler” and have “ease and poise,” while his central characters are “doomed from the start” and are “strewn along in angry, sulking remarks” (11–12). These defects result from O'Neill's worldview: “[his] philosophy is tinged with bitterness, darkness, and distrust” (13). Evidently, the despondent mood permeating many of O'Neill's plays is unacceptable.Geddes's brief analyses of individual plays, while sometimes insightful, are puzzling. The list is neither comprehensive nor chronological, starting with The Hairy Ape and including The Emperor Jones and Beyond the Horizon. Covering fourteen plays under eleven subheadings (The Fountain, Marco Millions, and Lazarus Laughed are lumped together), the list omits the one-act plays and only briefly alludes to the Glencairn Cycle. Geddes seems to harbor some sort of personal grudge, opening this analytical section by declaring that O'Neill “has been given more credit for originality … than he deserves” (14). Of The Hairy Ape, Geddes concludes, “from the standpoint of drama, there is practically none” (15). Brutus Jones is “like a man fighting an octopus,” in a play that “repeats through seven more scenes what was adequately conveyed in the first scene” (20). Geddes makes no mention of O'Neill's three Pulitzer Prizes and indeed dismisses Beyond the Horizon as a “poem written in prose dialogue” (21), “Anna Christie” as “not drama but background without a play” (17), and Strange Interlude as “more of a story than a drama” and as “never arous[ing] the divine dramatic fire” (29, 30). One may infer from these somewhat cryptic remarks that an authentic “drama” requires more action and less dialogue. Thus, Geddes declares The Great God Brown “more mood than mind” and asserts that Dynamo lacks “warm blood” and relies on “shopworn dialogue” (23, 24). Even Mourning Becomes Electra is derided for lacking “spiritual guts” because “the author leaves [his ‘people’] at the precise moment they grow most interesting” (33). Here, Geddes refers primarily to Christine Mannon, whom he views as intriguing and deserving of more stage time and development. The play itself, however, is overly long: O'Neill's “determin[ation] to make a trilogy” at any cost resulted in a work that is “surprisingly unimportant, unoriginal, and devoid of convincing and inventive theatre” (33).Many of Geddes's opinions of individual O'Neill plays may seem myopic, and even impulsive, yet this is precisely what makes this book fascinating as a historical marker. As a contemporary of O'Neill, Geddes seems to have written this book as a way of spitting against the wind, with perhaps no small amount of envy. When Geddes insists that O'Neill is “not a great artist” because “he exploits more old means than he suggests new ones” (35), we know what Geddes did not know in 1934: that O'Neill's best plays were in front of him, not behind. When Geddes declares with satisfaction that O'Neill's plays have had “little influence on young dramatists” (6), we know this claim will ultimately prove to be untrue. On the other hand, some of Geddes's views are piquant and provocative, such as his suggestion that O'Neill is part of an American tradition of “angry literary he-men” including Frank Norris and Jack London (35). Pertinent as well are his claims that O'Neill is “more sensitive to the elements and circumstances that affect people than he is to the people themselves” and that “his rumblings accumulate into a mass, in which flashes of beauty and compassion give occasional radiance to the dark whole” (37). This comparison of O'Neill's work to a thunderstorm, full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying nothing, is similar to other metaphors describing O'Neill's plays as “explosive” and like “bombshell[s]” (6).Near the end of his book, Geddes acknowledges, somewhat reluctantly, that “America had no dramatist worthy of the name before O'Neill” (40). Nevertheless, he insists that O'Neill is not a proper dramatist, as relying too heavily on “stage machinery, exposition, novel and diverting talk” (36). Such allegations evidently justify Geddes's disparaging use of his portmanteau word “melodramadness.” Later critics have disagreed. Kurt Eisen argues that O'Neill in the 1920s “appropriates melodramatic sensibility by making it explicitly a mode of consciousness, often in ironic contrast to the conflicting evidence of personal experience and external events” (The Inner Strength of Opposites [1994], 11; see also Brietzke, The Aesthetics of Failure [2001], chap. 5). But Geddes will have none of this, insisting that O'Neill, like D. H. Lawrence, is a “victim of his passionate intensity,” a man “in love with the enraged song of himself” (42–43). This results in plays rife with “ham poetry,” which Geddes condemns as “a major defect” (44).The book's final salvo takes aim at O'Neill's portrayal of women, again emphasizing deficiencies. O'Neill's early sea plays intentionally positioned men “away from woman” (41), although his female characters subsequently “blossomed … in the world of men and their moods but [were] still colored by the force of man-made prejudice” (42). In his more recent plays, Geddes asserts, O'Neill “returned and magnified symbolical manner in which she [‘woman’] began” (42). Geddes gives Desire Under the Elms his only positive review, because in Abbie Putnam the playwright had finally created “a woman who is also in the truest sense a person” (21). Overall, however, O'Neill is simply “oblivious to the woman side of the world” (9).I find myself wondering why Geddes made no mention of Days Without End, which had appeared one year earlier. This play was widely panned by critics and seems as though it would have provided ample fodder for Geddes's assault on O'Neill's purported “melodramadness.” One might likewise wonder for whom Geddes was writing; who was his intended audience? Was it for his fellow thespians in the Brookfield Players, who maybe passed around this little book while mumbling their assent in a sort of shared confederacy against America's most celebrated playwright? After all, the book's title page identifies itself as the fourth of “the Brookfield Pamphlets,” suggesting propaganda. The preceding three pamphlets were titled The American Theater—What Can Be Done?, Towards Revolution in the Theater, and The Theatre of Dreadful Nights. It is remarkable (and revealing) that the fourth pamphlet focused solely on O'Neill. And one cannot help but wonder how Virgil Geddes reacted when O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature just two years after his book appeared.
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